DAUPHIN COUNTY, Pa. (WHTM) — One of Pennsylvania’s most profitable companies is expanding its footprint in the commonwealth and also doing its part to bolster a battered supply chain.
It is huge. 745,000 square feet which are equivalent to 13 football fields. It is state of the art. And it is profitable. $5 billion in sales last year for the fourth largest private company in Pa.
D&H Distributing is the ultimate middle man buying IT, like computers from manufacturers and selling them to the likes of best buy or walmart.com.
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“We do business with every college campus in the United States. Any college bookstore you go to whether you buy a notebook computer or a flash drive or anything you buy technology-related, it probably came from D&H,” Co-President Dan Schwab said.
Its business requires getting stuff from point A to point B as quickly and cheaply as possible. The so-called supply chain. “The pandemic caused all of that to break down,” Co-President Michael Schwab said.
Pre-pandemic, containers from China cost $5,000 to ship to the U.S. post-pandemic?
“All the way up north of 20,000 dollars four times the cost to ship a container,” Schwab said. Four times the cost and twice the time. “This was a wake-up call in many ways,” Schwab added.
Too much reliance on Chinese manufacturers, too little stored inventory in the United States are two of the takeaways.
“I think the worse is behind us. I think we are coming out of the pandemic in a much more eyes wide open understanding of the risks in the supply chain,” Schwab said. Risks that are eased by brand new distribution centers.
“The inventory that we have right here right now that can get delivered tomorrow,” Schwab said.
This shiny new place is more than D&H needs right now, but hope it will be just right in the years to come.
“We built this facility to be here for decades so that’s why you see excess capacity we want to invest in the local economy and create local jobs,” Dan Schwab said.
D&H could have gotten one of those PPP loans and wouldn’t have to pay it back. They decided as a company to not even apply.
